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Today, more than ever, in these turbulent times that we are living in the Church, we need to anchor ourselves in the Truth and Treasures of our Catholic Faith.

Bob & Penny’s books & DVDs are timeless.

They will strengthen your faith in the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist;apparitions and messages of our Blessed Mother; miracles that have come about through the Crossand the Child Jesus; our role models, the Super Saints; Martyrs who gave their life rather than deny their Faith.

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“Now venerable brethren, you know the times in which we live. They are scarcely less deplorable for the Christian religion than the days which in times past were mostly full of misery of the Church.

We see Faith, the root of all Christian virtues, lessening in many souls; we see charity growing cold; the young generation growing daily in depravity of morals and views; the Church of Jesus Christ attacked on every side by open force or by craft, a relentless war waged against the Sovereign Pontiff and the very foundations of religion undermined with a boldness which waxes daily in intensity.”

Sounds like our times, right? This was written by Pope Leo XIII in 1889

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Saint Kateri TekakwithaLily of the MohawksMystic of the New WorldFruit of the Martyrs

The Lord takes us into the wilderness of a new, uncharted, untouched world, to share with us the beauty of His creation and the power of His works through the first beatified native person born in this country. In our book, Martyrs, They Died for Christ, we wrote about a new breed of Evangelists who came upon the horizon, whose images cast a broad shadow on a new world. These were brave, totally committed men of France, the Jesuit Blackrobes, who came to our continent in the early Seventeenth Century with only one goal – to bring Jesus to the pagans who inhabited the land.
The move by these French priests was spearheaded by an observation made by Samuel Champlain as he traveled the breadth of the St. Lawrence River, which then broadened out to Lake Ontario. He noticed as he sailed past all the Indian villages, there were so many children of God who knew nothing about Our Lord Jesus, our Savior. He wrote, in his journal, how sad it was that most of these people would live their entire lives never having heard the name of Jesus and would die without the grace of having known Him or being a part of His Church through Baptism.
When this word came back to the Church of France, an avalanche of fervor swept across the country. But it was the newly-formed army of Ignatius Loyola, the Company of Jesus, the Jesuits,1 who took it as a call to spiritual arms. The French contingency of that order accepted the challenge put to them. They embraced St. Paul’s plea to the Christians of another time, the early days of the Church, as a call to arms. They used his words as their battle cry.
“For everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. But how can they call on Him in whom they have not believed?
And how can they believe in Him whom they have not heard?
And how can they hear without someone to preach?
And how can people preach unless they are sent?”2
They came over to New France, as Canada was called at that time. They came with hearts burning to spread the word of God to the Indians and to die as Martyrs for Evangelization to the New World. By the thousands they came. They set up missions, worked in the wilderness, learned the language and customs of the Indians and gently, very gently taught them about Jesus. Their progress ranged from slow to full stop. But they persevered! They had many obstacles to overcome, many of which were caused by their own people. Before the Blackrobes ever got to Canada and upper New York State, they were preceded by trappers and fur traders who cared little or nothing for the people who lived on the lands, the natives of our country. They represented nothing but a way to satisfy their greed.
These were followed by the Military, whose only purpose was to obtain and maintain control and keep the Indians in their grip. Neither group would have won any popularity contests among the Indians. What they did manage to accomplish was to create an atmosphere of suspicion and distrust for any white men. The Blackrobes became victims because of the iniquities their countrymen and others3 had inflicted upon the natives of America.
Add to that the Indians’ own culture, which was so completely different from the French settlers. Both the French and the Indians focused on the things which separated them, rather than try to find a common denominator- those qualities which could unite them. The Iroquois, who were the strongest of the Indian tribes, hated the Hurons, who traded with the French; therefore, the Iroquois hated the French. They were friendly with the Dutch and the British who were at odds and sometimes at war with the French. That could account for a great deal of the hostility between the Iroquois and the French.
But the real victims had to be the Blackrobes, the Jesuit Evangelists. They were blamed for everything. If the Iroquois attacked the Hurons, it was the fault of the Blackrobes. If the Hurons suffered drought, it was the fault of the Blackrobes. If the crops failed, it was because of the black magic of the Blackrobes. If illness were to take its toll on the Indian population, because of strains of bacteria, brought into the continent by the French, Dutch and British, it became strangely enough the fault of the Blackrobes. To this day, there are those in Canada who blame the Jesuits for the rampant disease to which the Indian population was subjected, and because of which they died in great numbers.
But what was the justification to blame the Jesuits? They were no more responsible for spreading the viruses than any other foreigner who emigrated to the country. However, they were the most vulnerable. They were the easiest to attack and the least able to defend themselves. There came a time in 1649, after the torturous execution of John de Brebuf, Gabriel Lalemant, and others in Huronia, when the wholesale slaughter of the Blackrobes became too much for the Superiors in Quebec to accept, and so they closed down the missions, burned to the ground Saint Marie of the Hurons, the settlement which they had built as a headquarters for the missionaries, and left to go back to Quebec. The mission venture to Huronia was a failure. The wilderness reclaimed the lands in which the Blackrobes had labored and died, their blood left as fertilizer for the growth of the new missions, the fruit of the Martyrs.
In Ossernenon, which is modern-day Auriesville, New York, the first of the North American Martyrs René Goupil was martyred in 1642, tomahawked for making the Sign of the Cross on a young Indian’s forehead. At that same place, St. Isaac Jogues and St. Jean Lalande, a lay Donné,4 were martyred also. The Missionaries left and the cause seemed lost. But on that soil, in that place, the Lord was to plant the seeds of Evangelization into the blood-soaked earth, which would grow into what would be the first Native American Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha, the Lily of the Mohawks, the Mystic of the Wilderness. And she has now been canonized, finally brought into the Communion of Saints, she is the first Native American, first fruit of the North American Martyrs.

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Rome of his day had become nothing but a barbaric cesspool, filled with pagan tribes, who had invaded her shores, spreading heresy and immoral behavior the likes of which was leading to a widespread depraved and decadent culture infecting all, but especially the intelligentsia, as usual the students.
As goes the world, sadly, often follows the Church. Poor Mother Church was reeling from the attacks within and without – with schisms threatening to tear down all that the Early Church Fathers had built. Immoral and amoral behavior soon became the accepted norm of the day with Christians accepting and adopting the culture of the hordes of heathens who had stormed their land. With permissiveness, war and rampant widespread plundering are sure to follow. There was not a ruler or king who was not either a pagan, or an atheist, or a heretic.
Benedict moves on
Holiness begets holiness, as well as sin begets sin. As sheep willingly follow a goat to slaughter, so it was with this scourge which covered society. It was such a deadly epidemic no one was exempt from its poisonous infection. The wholesale evil and totally immoral behavior of the parents soon cascaded down to the youth, who willing followed and consequently mimicked their example. By the grace of God, the young Benedict was repulsed by all the evil and scandalous behavior he could see permeating not only Rome, but the schools. Not prideful, and totally devoid of the brash opinion of youth, and society as well, that they can handle anything, Benedict made the decision to leave Rome. The only one he told was his nurse, who accompanied him.

The path was clear for him. Having completed all that higher education of his day could offer, he left behind his books; and rejecting all the trappings of the world, his parents’ wealth and comforts of home and estate, departed for a life centered in God. It is fairly certain Benedict left Rome at age twenty, as he was mature enough to discern the decadency and immorality of his friends and class mates.
First small step to a holy life
Benedict and his nurse made their way to Affile, a small town deep into the mountains, about thirty miles from Rome. There he would start a new life, with possibly others who desired a life centered in God. This was not to be. Try as he may, he soon realized he could not achieve here the closeness with God he so dearly desired. Leaving the temptations of Rome had not been enough. If he was to know God, he would have to lead a solitary life – away from the world.
The First Miracle
The anonymity he so desperately sought was not to be his in this small village, especially once he miraculously mended an earthenware vessel, which his nurse had borrowed and broken. He pleaded with her to not share the miraculous happenings. Did she comply? No! She went about the village broadcasting the miracle that had come about. The locals even put up a sign on the church, detailing the miracle and the young man who had brought it about. Enough said, that was to be the end of any possible inner peace and quiet meditative reflection he could hope for. The only way was to leave Affile and any friends he had made there, sympatico as they might have been. He found he could no longer have the comfort of having his pious nurse with him. He made the decision to make it alone, with only God as his Comfort and Shield.
New home – new beginnings – life as a hermit, at last.

Click tihis link to view short video – https://youtu.be/1GvVe9N144k
Now completely alone, Benedict scaled hills upon hills until he arrived at the shaggy, rocky rough-hewn mountains of Subiaco. (Till today, the mountains are steep and more than a little challenging to ascend.) At last, a hermitage where he could find some peace and solitude! But how? As God would have it, Benedict came upon a monk named Romanus. He poured his heart out to the monk, sharing his deep desire to live a hermit’s life. Although the monk lived in a monastery quite a distance away, he, without hesitating, dressed Benedict in sheepskins and escorted the youth to a cave in the mountains. Benedict desired to be alone. Well, here in this cave, removed from all civilization, he would know the quiet and solitary life, for which he so hungered. His cave, with its flat, sharp, jagged rock as a roof, made access to him from on top of the cave impossible. And should one attempt to approach the cave from below, the sharp climb to the cave was made hazardous by unscalable cliffs, thick brush, and a forest dense with trees obscuring it further.
Alone and solitary, prayer his loving companion, living this very austere life, his only human contact with anyone was the monk Romanus, who brought him a little sustenance each day. Benedict would recover it from a rope lowered down the steep slope by Romanus; upon which the monk placed a small ration of bread. Benedict was completely content. He had read about Anthony the Abbot and other Desert Fathers, and although he was still a young man, he desired this life more than anything on earth. His desert life went on for three years.

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The Mexican Martyrs we have 6 episodes about the Mexican Martyrs of the 20th Century

Beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1992. We visit Totatiche in the state of Jalisco, where St. Magallanes built a seminary.

Personal testimony from an eyewitness who was a friend of Fr. Magallanes and Fr. Caloca in the seminary at Totatiche.

See where they worked, teaching the people and carrying on their ministry of priests under constant threat of exposure and capture by the troops of Plutarco Calles, Mason and dictatorial president of Mexico.